Our Travel Blog: Española Island

Monday, February 4, 2019

Española is the southernmost island and the oldest island. It is 60 sq km. The English name for Española is Hood, named for an English admiral. It has the highest rate of endemic species of the Galapagos Islands, probably because it is one of the most isolated of the islands.

imagecredit:https://www.vacationstogo.com/cruise_port/Espanola__Galapagos_Islands__Ecuador.cfm

Animals on this island include mockingbirds, blue-footed and Nazca boobies, Darwin finches, red and green marine iguanas, Galapagos doves and hawks, and sea lions.

In 1820, the crew of the Essex (which inspired Herman Melville's book Moby Dick) landed on Española. They took 300 giant tortoises from Española as food, believing that tortoises could live a year without food or water. In reality, the tortoises slowly starved.

imagecredit:https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/In-the-Heart-of-the-Sea-The-Tragedy-of-the-Whaleship-Essex

The Española giant tortoise species was almost extinct in the 1960s, with only 14 of them left. The 2 males and 12 females were taken to the captive breeding center on Santa Cruz. They were the first Galapagos tortoises to ever be bred in captivity. Researchers also searched the world over for any other surviving Española tortoises. It seems that sailors had taken 13 of them in the early 1900s and they found their way to the San Diego Zoo. Only one was still alive. He was named Diego and brought to the breeding center in 1977. He has been quite prolific, producing hundreds of offspring so far. In fact, Diego is said to be responsible for about 45% of the hatchlings. The Restoration Program has successfully released over 2000 Española tortoises back onto the island.

imagecredit:https://www.galapagos.org/newsroom/success-for-espanola-tortoises/

To get to an island, we take a zodiac from the large ship. Sometimes it is a wet landing where we get our feet wet, or a dry landing where we disembark on rocks or maybe even a pier. We were introduced to the Galapagos Handshake, where the passenger has to hold the guide's arm when getting in and out of a zodiac.

In the morning we were at the northeast shore at Gardner Bay (7 am to 2 pm). It has a long white sand beach (2 km long) and clear blue waters. The beach is white coral sand flecked with bits of colour, very pretty. The beach was full of sea lions laying around. It may also be the only place in the Galapagos where you can roam freely without your naturalist guide.

The Hood Mockingbirds have been known to be quite bold with visitors, landing on your head or shoulders, trying to untie your shoelaces, or pecking at your water bottles to try to get water.

We saw manta rays in the water:

These are the tracks of a nesting sea turtle:

The sea lions really seemed to like Frankie:

We spent an hour snorkeling:

A whale skeleton on the beach:

In the afternoon, the ship went around Española Island to Punta Suárez (Suárez Point) (3 pm to 7 pm). We had a choice of long difficult walk or short walk. Punta Suárez (Suárez Point) has the longest trail of any of the trails we would take on this trip, about 4 km. It included low scrub brush, a beach with sea lions, and lots of clambering over lava rocks. It was soooo hot and humid, we were glad when it got overcast!

There were lazy sea lions at the rocky landing site, with lots of babies that were adorable.

The Sally Lightfoot Crabs were striking against the rocks.

We had to watch our step to make sure we didn't step on any lava lizards.

This is a marine iguana. Española is the only place where the marine iguanas remain brightly coloured throughout the year. The locals call them Christmas lizards.

Suárez Point is the only place in the world where albatross make their nests. Starting in April, 25,000 – 30,000 albatrosses will come here to mate. We didn't see any albatross, but they have started to arrive because the naturalist Diego saw their guava and we saw an abandoned egg.